A new research from the University of Texas at Dallas confirms that a diet rich in sugar may be fuelling various forms of cancer by giving tumors the energy for multiplying.

Scientist found that squamous cell carcinoma was more dependent on sugar to grow than other forms of cancer.

Dr. Jung-whan Kim, a lead author of the study, says: “It has been suspected that many cancer cells are heavily dependent on sugar as their energy supply. But it turns out that one specific type – squamous cell carcinoma – is remarkably more dependent. This type of cancer clearly consumes a lot of sugar. One of our next steps is to look at why this is the case.”

Brain cancer is the most difficult cancer to remove, as it is like a cloud where a center could be defined, but the edges are hardly discernible. In other cancers, doctors just take some non-essential tissues around the tumor as well, but this is not the case with the brain. There are no non-essential tissues.

That’s why a new technology, called SRS microscopy, is so extremely helpful to surgeons to define the tumor size. The technique has been already tried on about 360 patients at the University of Michigan Medical School and Harvard University.

Dr. Daniel Orringer, one of the researchers, says: “It makes a huge difference, the process currently in place dates back to the 1800s, and we have something disruptive, in a good way, and the implications are pretty profound.”